Application-level software code is prone to security vulnerabilities: Sections of the code, when executed, may allow external inputs to cause improper or undesired behavior, which can compromise data privacy and proper system operation. Examples of vulnerabilities include buffer overflow, race conditions, and privilege escalation. Such vulnerabilities may be introduced intentionally by programmers or accidentally, due to improper programming practice.
Methods for detection of software vulnerabilities are known in the art. For example, U.S. Patent Application Publication 2010/0083240, whose disclosure is incorporated herein by reference, describes a tool that automatically analyzes source code for application-level vulnerabilities. Operation of the tool is based on static analysis, but it makes use of a variety of techniques, for example methods of dealing with obfuscated code.
Sequence mining is a type of structured data mining that is concerned with finding statistically relevant patterns in data examples in which values occur in sequence. It may be applied both to strings of symbols and to ordered sequences of items (such as words, phrases, tags, or events).
A variety of sequence mining algorithms are known in the art. For example, the popular GSP algorithm is described by Srikant and Agrawal in “Mining Sequential Patterns: Generalizations and Performance Improvements,” EDBT '96 Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Extending Database Technology: Advances in Database Technology (Springer-Verlag, 1996), pages 3-17, which is incorporated herein by reference. Another algorithm, known as SPADE, is described by Zaki in “SPADE: An Efficient Algorithm for Mining Frequent Sequences,”Machine Learning 42 (2001), pages 31-60, which is also incorporated herein by reference. Yet another examiner is PrefixSpan, which is described by Pei et al., in “ Mining Sequential Patterns by Pattern-Growth: The PrefixSpan Approach,” IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering 16:10 (2004), pages 1424-1440, which is also incorporated herein by reference. Further algorithms are referenced in the above-mentioned provisional patent application.